Woke up yesterday with a sore throat, headache, dizzy as a hoot owl, and not feeling well at all, when the two days prior I’d been on top of the world.<\/p>\n
Yep, the tree. We have to have an artificial tree: I’m so allergic to trees in general it’s pathetic, and can’t even touch raw or living oak wood—I could NOT have been a Druid—but cut evergreen has been the bane of my Christmases lifelong.<\/p>\n
As a kid I was sick every December, and would come down with a roaring ear infection that would keep me abed during most every Christmas, and with an infection that would last into mid-January. Ie, when our tree came down, and when everybody else had to put theirs out, I’d begin to recover. For those of you who don’t have allergies—the infection follows shortly on the irritation of tissues that comes from bad post-nasal drip. It’s such fun. In those Jurassic days, every school, shop, church, and most houses had cut evergreen all over the place. There was no escaping it.<\/p>\n
Of course in the 1940’s nobody knew much about allergy, and half the medical profession didn’t believe in it, outside of ‘hay fever’. I was accused of going outside without my cap, or scarf, or maybe it was gloves; I was bundled indoors at the first hint of snow and told I was too sickly to go out and play. And there would be the tree, cut fir, or worse, at my grandmother’s house, cedar straight from the fields; and I’d be abed again for the season, shut in WITH the source of my problem, with all doors and windows sealed against ‘cold air’. I tried to tell them the ‘cold air’ relieved the problem. But of course the doctor knew best.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until the ’50’s that they figured it out, and we got one of the early holiday trees: aluminum. You couldn’t put lights ON it: they came from a color wheel that sat on the floor next to it. You could hang ornaments on it, and we were counted very modern; but they still had real trees at school, and at church, and I was a bit better for longer, but still sick every Christmas. I was forbidden to go out in the snow because, yes, now baby brother was reactive to ‘cold air’ and ‘sickly’, and I couldn’t go out because the baby would want to go out. Sigh.<\/p>\n
Then we discovered a new thing: instead of me growing out of it, it got worse. I got to where I couldn’t visit a house with a tree. I taught school for a decade—and routinely, every Christmas, I’d totally lose my voice: they still hung garland in school. So I’d be voiceless for at least a week.<\/p>\n
And the new fiber trees have one drawback: if you don’t replace them every 3 years, they get mold. And mold has just about the same effect on me as real evergreen does. My ears ache, my nose pours, and, as with many molds, they’re psychoactive, and I get depressed and Jane gets her own version of it. <\/p>\n
Well, darn it, we have a tree we love: the last of the really good fiberoptics. And it’s, yes, old. And we should replace it, but it’s up, and it’s beautiful, one of the prettiest trees we’ve ever had…<\/p>\n
I went off to Costco yesterday while Jane was on the ice and got an air purifier, and we set it beside the tree going full blast, which I think, this morning, is helping. It’s one of those Oreck things, with a killer throughput and good filters, and the air is much cleaner in the living room. My room only has one of the passive electrostatic flow sorts, that puts out a trickle of good air. But at least I’m on the upswing: I slept all yesterday afternoon, watched Hell’s Kitchen, then went back to bed and slept hard; and this morning, though I now have some of the symptoms of a sinus infection, congestion and the remains of a sore throat, I’m hoping I can throw it off.<\/p>\n
I could so easily become a Grinch. But I’m going to enjoy the season. If it takes antibiotics again to do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Woke up yesterday with a sore throat, headache, dizzy as a hoot owl, and not feeling well at all, when the two days prior I’d been on top of the world. Yep, the tree. We have to have an artificial tree: I’m so allergic to trees in general it’s pathetic, and can’t even touch raw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}